STANNOP, Edwin

With the exception of Thomas Compworth*, Edwin Stannop is the most interesting of those elected to represent Northampton in the reign of Henry VI. There is nothing other than his surname to connect him with the wealthy gentry family settled at Rampton in Nottinghamshire, and his origins are to be sought elsewhere. He first appears in the records as early as 1421 when he brought an action of trespass against a husbandman of Ecton, a few miles from Northampton, and it is a fair surmise that he was born in the vicinity of the county town.1 KB27/639, rot. 67. More interestingly, he was probably a man of legal training. Such a conclusion is consistent with his frequent personal appearances, from the mid 1430s, as a plaintiff in the central courts.2 e.g. KB27/695, rot. 45; 696, rot. 37; 760, rot. 5d; 780, rot. 17d; 782, rot. 77d; CP40/712, rot. 276. It also tallies with his description as a ‘bailiff’ (not in the sense of a town officer) when he is first mentioned in connexion with Northampton: in Michaelmas 1432, together with several townsmen (including Richard Ward*), he was attached to reply to the King on a plea of contempt and trespass.3 KB27/686, rex rot. 23. This action was abandoned in 1433 when no one came to lay information against the defendants, only to be resumed and abandoned on the same grounds in 1436: KB27/689, rex rot. 17d; 702, rex rot. 24d. Although thereafter he was closely involved in borough affairs, his main landholdings lay just outside the town. He is generally described as ‘of Hardingstone’, a couple of miles to the south of Northampton, and he also had property at nearby Far Cotton.4 In 1433 he sued a shepherd of Hardingstone and others for close-breaking there and in a plea of 1439 and 1445 he is described as ‘of Far Cotton’: CP40/691, rot. 275; 712, rot. 276; 737, rot. 398.

As with many other lawyers Stannop appears to have had an aggressive attitude to his neighbours. On 11 June 1433 he appeared before Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, as one of the county j.p.s., to find surety of the peace to a townsman, William Louke. In a petition to the chancellor in the mid 1430s, Henry Stone*, then mayor, complained that Stannop had disinherited ‘de sa Imaginacion et covyn’ the hospital of St. Leonard of unspecified lands, with the result that the hospital could no longer discharge its social and religious function. The mayor’s interest in the matter lay in the burgesses’ ownership of the advowson of the hospital, which was an immediate neighbour of our MP in Far Cotton and Hardingstone.5 C244/8/72; C1/11/172; VCH Northants. ii. 159. Later, in Easter term 1445, Stannop was one of several men sued by the King’s attorney for illegally hunting in the King’s free warren at Northampton and at nearby Boughton and Kingsthorpe.6 CP40/737, rot. 398.

Nothing, however, in Stannop’s earlier career prepares us for the last and most striking appearance in the records. In the Coventry Parliament of 1459 the Commons presented a petition to the King against 25 men ‘notariely and universally thorough oute all this your Realme famed and noysed, knowen and reputed severally, for open Robbers’. Among them were such notorious felons as William Tailboys* and Henry Bodrugan† and it is surprising to find also included the name of one ‘Owen Stanhop, once of Northampton, yeoman’.7 PROME, xii. 499-502. Although this list is one of felons rather than Yorkists (it included partisans of both sides), it is possible that our MP’s inclusion may have owed something to Yorkist sympathies. The evidence is indirect. His election to Parliament in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans is suggestive, particularly because he did not conform to the pattern established among Northampton’s MPs. He was not, as nearly all the others were, a tradesman at the beginning of his career. Further, early in 1463 Walter Stotfeld of Ampthill (Bedfordshire) boarded his new wife, Alice, widow of Thomas Mulsho*, with one Elizabeth Stannop at Northampton. If Elizabeth was, as is probable, our MP’s widow then this arrangement connects Stannop with the Yorkists. Stotfeld’s master was Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, whose treachery at the battle of Northampton was the principal factor in the Yorkist victory there, and Mulsho had been a committed Yorkist who appears to have been murdered in that cause. This in turn raises the possibility that Stannop met his death in that battle on the Yorkist side.8 CP40/812, rot. 125.